All the things they beg to be free takes someone's time to produce.
It's only fair that if these people have to give their time for free, people wanting free stuff should start by refusing pay for their time.
But they won't because we all know it's all about "give me free" anyway.
I don't see how this is an issue restricted to socialised healthcare. A workforce shortage can happen regardless of how you handle healthcare.
Murder and Slavery are violations of a person's Rights to Life and Liberty. When government pretends to elevate Medical Treatment to the same status as other Rights, it turns failure into a crime on par with those two.
A non-socialized hospital with a workplace shortage is a hospital with a workplace shortage; they have a limited capacity, and such is life. If the hospital is out of resources, then they are out. If you have enough cash in hand, they can clear out an office and get an overnight delivery of the medications you require, but it would be unrealistic for a facility to go to that much trouble on a regular basis. In failing to sell you their service, they have wronged you about as much as a street vendor that has sold all his product has wronged the homeless man down the road.
Certainly there is a moral good to feeding the homeless man or to providing free medical treatment, but the homeless man was not entitled to the hot dog.
if it is a violation of rights that patients are not offered equal treatment due to staff shortages, surely it is far worse to have a system designed around only catering to people who can afford healthcare.
Correct. Good thing I consider inequal treatment an inevitablity and therefore not qualified to be counted among the Human Rights. There is, of course, a moral failing somewhere in the inequality, but in a non-socialized system the moral burden sits squarely on the conscience of the medical practitioner.
In a socialized system, you bring managers and clerks in to shoulder the moral responsibilities, quislings that are incapable of doing the work themselves and are well-motivated to hide their weakness behind the bureaucratic process. The US, of course, is not free of this. Medical regulation is so stringent here that we have this problem anyways.
it has been constantly underfunded for the past 10 years
I consider this a moot point because it looks like the budget is plateaued. The budget isn't actually going down; it just isn't going up. But demand is.
At some point a for-profit hospital must throw up its hands and declare that the resources to do more work simply aren't available at reasonable levels of effort or expense. Government, on the other hand, doesn't like to be reminded that people and resources are finite. When it can't just generate more effort by decree, it makes up the difference in ballooning expenses.
I don't see how this is an issue restricted to socialised healthcare. A workforce shortage can happen regardless of how you handle healthcare.
I'd also add that if it is a violation of rights that patients are not offered equal treatment due to staff shortages, surely it is far worse to have a system designed around only catering to people who can afford healthcare. We have had issues in the UK with a lack of medical staff over the past few years, something that has oddly improved during covid because it raised interest in working for the NHS. It isn't because the system is bad, it is because it has been constantly underfunded for the past 10 years in an attempt by our conservative government to start privatising various branches of it.